Merce Cunningham Remembered

Laura Diffenderfer | Jul 28, 2009 | 0

Merce Cunningham, who was routinely referred to as the world's greatest living choreographer, died last night in his Manhattan home at the age of 90. Born on April 16, 1919 in Centralia, Wash., Cunningham studied tap and ballroom dancing as a child with Maude Barrett, a retired vaudeville performer. He went on to attend the Cornish School in Seattle, where he began taking modern dance classes with Bonnie Bird, a young teacher who had danced with Martha Graham. In 1939, Cunningham attended the first West Coast session of the Bennington College modern dance summer school at Mills College, where he caught the eye of Graham. She invited Cunningham to come to New York to dance with her troupe and in September of that year, Cunningham became the second male to join the Martha Graham Dance Company, which he performed in as a soloist for five years.

Bird not only led Cunningham to Graham, but to a composer who would help Cunningham to form new ideas about dance and its relationship to music. While at the Cornish School, Bird introduced Cunningham to a young musician she had just hired to be her chief accompanist and music director, John Cage. Although Cunningham would collaborate with many important contemporary artists in the years to come, including Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol, it was his partnership with Cage that would prove most significant. In the 1940s, Cage and Cunningham began a long, fruitful relationship in both life and art that continued until Cage's death in 1992. Together, they proposed new and radical ideas, the most important being the notion that dance and music should be created separately and performed simultaneously, without supporting each other in the traditional way. The two creations would exist independently, producing a spontaneous relationship when combined for the first time--usually opening night.

Cunningham, like Cage and a number of other artists in the 1950s, began using chance procedures in his work, often turning to dice, cards and the ancient Chinese text "I Ching" for guidance. This is a practice he continued to rely on throughout his career. For instance, in his 2003 work "Split Sides," he used dice to select the order of the music, to decide which dancers would perform the sections and to determine which set pieces and costumes would be used. Because Zen Buddhism and nature were also influential in Cunningham's aesthetic, customary features of choreography like narrative, musicality and climax were replaced by abstract movement, unexpected movement and music pairings, and a conscious departure from the notion of dance as entertainment.

Since the founding of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company in the summer of 1953, Cunningham choreographed nearly 200 works for his company, including "Sounddance" (1975), "Fabrications" (1987) and "BIPED" (1999), which are all currently still in the repertory. He made important contributions to dance for the camera, with his collaborations with filmmakers like Charles Atlas and Elliot Caplan. He was a pioneer in marriage of dance and technology, combining them in both creation and performance. Revered as a gifted and dedicated teacher, even into 2009, Cunningham remained inspiring and inspired until the end.

In April of this year, he presented his last work "Nearly Ninety," which opened at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on the artist's 90th birthday, proving to sold-out audiences that he was still an artist of supreme talent. Chief dance critic of The New York Times, Alastair Macaulay called the dance "one of Mr. Cunningham's most poetic cornucopias," noting that his "imagination actually appears more fertile than ever before." With music by Led Zeplin's John Paul Jones, mixed-media sound artist Takehisa Kosugi and members of Sonic Youth, the work was simply one example of a forward-looking perspective that kept Cunningham's work perennially vanguard, and cemented his place as one of the most important artists of the 20th century.

For a figure of such elevated stature, he remained matter-of-fact about his process. "Over the history of art, something unfamiliar becomes part of society and everybody accepts it. Obviously, the artist goes on. You try to see what the next problem or question to ask is. That's what an artist does; you find another question," he said.

As announced before Cunningham's death, the company will embark on a two-year international tour before closing down the Cunningham Dance Foundation, which supports the company. In lieu of flowers or acknowledgments, the foundation requests that contributions be made to the company's Legacy Plan. For more information on this program and on Cunningham's life and work, visit www.merce.org

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Ballet, Modern, Ballroom, Teacher, Enthusiast, Chance procedures, John Cage, Laura Diffenderfer, Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham (all tags)